Andre Butzer’s work explores the romanticism of painting from a contemporary stand point. Inspired equally from popular culture and art history’s greats – from Ensor to De Kooning and Guston – Butzer’s wildly rendered canvases exude a frenetic creative energy redolent of the artistic myths of passion, power, and ‘genius’. Executed on monumental scale, Butzer’s paintings are a triumph of style over substance as his highly articulate techniques and compositions regurgitate graffiti scribbles and cartoon forms.  

Balancing between abstraction and figuration, Butzer’s crude aesthetics point to a modern day primitivism. Positing an instinctive response to the over saturation of media imagery and the constrictive weight of art history, Butzer’s paintings strive for, yet acknowledge the futility, of genuine expression. This ideological bankruptcy runs throughout Butzer’s work as a kind of ‘slacker virtuoso’ which humorously combines angst of modernism with an unapologetic Kippenberger-like cynicism.

Butzer’s canvases bully the viewer with their aggressive intensity: their surfaces textured like corroded debris, carved through with manic gestures, and ooze gobs of offensive colours, while reoccurring motifs of screaming faces, phalluses, ecstasy tablet logos, and sperm war against each other in anarchic ritual. Raw with egoism, machismo, and zeal, Butzer’s paintings serve up contemporary anxiety with a violent potency that’s vehement, heroic and bereft.